Making the Good (Liberal) Muslim Subject: Rethinking the Model-Minority Stereotype in the Age of Islamophobia

• In Event: Perceptions of (Im)Possibility: Muslim Students' Reality Within a Context of Islamophobia

Abstract

Objectives. This paper focuses on how the model-minority stereotype for Asian-Americans in conversation with the good Muslim/bad Muslim binary stereotype offers an analytic framework by which we can understand how educational institutions and state apparatus facilitate differentiated forms of transnational (im)mobility. In addition, it documents emerging transnational racial assemblages that hinge on creating dichotomies between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ citizen types.

Perspective(s) or theoretical framework. This study relies on the use of a ‘transnational optic’ to see beyond official borders and boundaries to describe emerging global migration processes through education (Khagram & Levitt 2007). This allows a linking of the model-minority stereotype with the ‘good/bad Muslim’ stereotypes across transnational sites of higher education, describing the emergent racial assemblages and social processes that facilitate the production of the good (liberal) Muslim subject in the contemporary liberal university.

Method and Data Sources techniques.This study is based on fourteen months of transnational ethnographic fieldwork conducted from January 2013 until June 2014 at respective college campuses in Lahore, Pakistan and New York City. My focal participants consisted of first- and second-year college students who have traveled, either from peri-urban area to Lahore, or from rural areas in Pakistan to New York City, to pursue higher education. With both participant groups, my primary methods of investigation were qualitative, comprised of traditional ethnographic methods and linguistic anthropological methods to analyze emerging forms of personhood (Agha 2011).

Results. In this paper, I conceptualize an emergent kind of culture talk that impacts how youth citizenship is practiced and espoused within the global university. With regards to the good Muslim/bad Muslim binary, Mamdani (2004) explains that "Culture talk has turned religious experience into a political category,” and my arguments pushes this to see how religious experience has become a raciopolitical category. Similarly the model minority myth is an example of culture talk that originated in the story of Japanese Americans, post-internment camps, but has come to have a myth-like explanation for many Asian immigrant success stories. The model Muslim migrant type draws on the logic of the both stereotypic forms as another kind of cultural citizenship observable in educational spaces.

Significance. In this article, I focused on how the archetypes for South Asian migrants and Muslim youth play a role in the imaginations of college students as they go about their educational lives, but also how these archetypes are not located only in the US context, but are becoming salient in how minorities in other countries that America has a vested interest in are also dealing with these archetypes. While they may not be called model minorities in other spaces, that does not preclude the construction of the model citizen who thinks an education offers their family a way out, but it also positions them as somehow better than the most culturally deficient, i.e. morally bankrupt, which in some ways becomes the most religious, i.e. backward, people in society.

Author

• Mariam Durrani, Hamilton College